Posted
by
Soulskill
on Tuesday August 28, 2012 @02:44PM
from the if-only-we-had-robots-to-evaluate-patents dept.

New submitter Isara writes "GigaOm's Jeff John Roberts has a compelling writeup about patent trials and how juries are detrimental to justice in such cases. Roberts uses the recent Apple-Samsung trial as the backdrop for his article; although the trial lasted three weeks, during which hundreds of documents were presented and the finer points of U.S. patent law were discussed, the jury only took 2-3 days to deliberate. 'Patents are as complex as other industrial policies like subsidies or regulatory regimes. When disputes arise, they should be put before an expert tribunal rather than a jury that is easily swayed by schoolyard "copycat" narratives.'"

I think one problem is that patent lawsuits are just assumed to happen. It seems, too often, the patent office just approves patents figuring that they'd get sorted out in the courts. Meanwhile, the courts just assume that patents must be valid by default if they've been approved by the patent office.

1) Gut the patent system, releasing all patents into the public space or2) Move patents to a 5-10 year maximum life before they are turned over to the public

Innovation is key, but innovation doesn't necessarily mean figuring it out on your own. Too many companies have strangleholds on great technology and methods, and the not being able to access that information only hurts those trying to compete and become viable. The idea that you can patent things as silly as a lot of what comes through in the IT world (rounded corners, click to buy, slide to unlock, etc) is stifling not only competition, but entrepreneurs, students, and people who could take it and do something better.

If your company has to bank on a patent to remain profitable, then you probably don't deserve to continue to be a company - part of being the leader is being able to continue and innovate in a space without worrying that your competitor might know how you're doing X because you're already focusing your efforts and resources on developing Y instead.

Patents are basically a protection racket. Companies (like Apple, Samsung, etc.) shovel money at attorneys, into the patent office, into litigation, into licensing rights etc. in order to maintain an air of exclusivity over what is really a kind of pathetic "innovation" (rounded corners? wtf?) The narrowness threshold needs to be raised a LOT if the current system is to be kept tenable. If not, the precedent we see here (where a jury can be swayed on a pro-patent line with flimsy evidence) will cause a fi

It is when you have people different people writing software that does something very similar and the smaller guy gets sued out of business even though his product may have been better than his competitors just because an icon on one of the screens looked too close to the icon on the plaintiff's.

It appears that many of the studies have shown that heavy patents don't necessarily increase innovation, but rather direct the types of innovations that are made within an industry (perhaps: innovate for a long term lock-in, not for shorter term or wide-spread improvements).

/shrug I think patents have their place, but I can't fathom a reason why a company would need more than a decade of locked-in profits after a product is released to market. I can maybe see the case for the very, very expensive and time consuming process of drug manufacturing, but in those types of special cases, shouldn't the patent be proportionate to the time invested, and not a broad "You just won the cancer game for the next 63 years!" certificate?

Allow me to introduce to you the Sam Vimes Boot Theory of Economic Injustice

Samuel Vimes earned thirty-eight dollars a month as a Captain of the Watch, plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots, the sort that would last years and years, cost fifty dollars. This was beyond his pocket and the most he could hope for was an affordable pair of boots costing ten dollars, which might with luck last a year or so before he would need to resort to makeshift cardboard insoles so as to prolong the moment of shelling out another ten dollars.

Therefore over a period of ten years, he might have paid out a hundred dollars on boots, twice as much as the man who could afford fifty dollars up front ten years before. And he would still have wet feet.

Without any special rancour, Vimes stretched this theory to explain why Sybil Ramkin lived twice as comfortably as he did by spending about half as much every month.

A rich person will be able to spend the money upfront for future gain that a poor, or even upper middle class person has no chance or raising on their own. Poor people don't have investments because they cannot afford to have them, not because they don't understand the benefits of having a long term income.

Even for the wealthy, this isn't a question of what you can afford, it's a question of how much you can profit from it. The rich won't hold on to a patent if it will cost them more money than they can gain to do so.

This was the specific part of your comment I was responding to and my response can be summed up like this. The rich might not hold onto patents that aren't profitable, but they will hold on to patents that will profitable tomorrow, which is something the poor (or merely less rich) won't be able to do. Imagine you've invented a fabulous device that will, without a doubt, make billions of dollars, lets say a battery powered single stage to orbit rocket. You know others are working on similar designs so you rush out to patent it, even though the battery tech isn't there yet to actually make your design work. You're confident that the batteries will be available in 10 years though.

If you're rich, or a large corporation, you can pay your renewal fees, eat the cost and in 10 years you will utterly dominate the market. You'll make 10000x the cost that those patent renewal fees ran you. If you're poor however, you're left with only a few choices. You can sell your patent to someone who can afford the upfront costs of the renewal fees. You can partner with someone, who will undoubtedly demand the lions share of your profits because without their money will will get next to nothing. Either way, you're buying the cheap, leaky boots. Either way, you won't see a fraction the profit off your invention that you would if you had the money to pay for the patent renewals.

Wouldn't that fail in the case of a very desirable object? Let's take the gross case of the wheel, and suppose that ugg-ugg the caveman were able to live for millenia, or lived in a millenia-old society that allowed the inheritance of your renewable patents.
What incentive does ugg-ugg have to build something new, beyond new riches. All he has to do is continue to charge more for his wheel. Mind you, this is not the dude who invented a wheel that fits on a specific vehicle, this is "The Wheel."
I don't

Presumably people would stop buying wheels once they cost $100,000 each, at which point the owner would not be profiting, and would no longer renew their patent. (I believe the idea is a geometric / exponential growth in cost, not a simple linear one).

Yeah, I struggled with that one - I considered the idea that time spent developing something would correlate to time allotted to the patent's life, but then companies would work on something for a year and then sit on it for 20 years to keep the patent alive once it goes out into the public.

There may be a good method, but I think we just need to do away with the current system at least, and maybe create something that treats patents as a serious thing to protect legitimate, costly innovation. Rounding a cor

I don't really like the idea of replacing trial-by-jury as the ultimate arbiter, and in any case it would be difficult to get such a thing passed. A more incremental reform, easily doable within current constitutional law, would be to give the USPTO approval process more teeth so fewer bad patents get issued in the first place, and therefore trial never becomes a possibility. It shouldn't approve any old stuff that comes its way, but should really take the non-obviousness and novelty tests seriously.

This to a trillion degrees. The USPTO and the guys challenging a patent application are much better suited to knocking out bad patents before they are even born. Even more fundamentally, however, patents on genes and software should not be patentable subject matter.

What you say is fine in theory. Patent examiners are well suited to examine, and determine validity. But, they are so swamped at this point, there are far more patents to process than they can reasonably work through.

A former colleague worked at the USPTO, as an examiner, and he explained what happens. When you apply for a patent you are obligated to include the prior art that you found. In theory, they (the examiner) is also supposed to conduct a search for prior art, and to use that in their review process. But, one side effect of their being so overloaded is that this becomes a cursory search (if at all), and thus they rely on the submitted by the filer prior art declarations.

And here is how you game the system. A company tells their people to not be too diligent in their vetting and searching. Thus major prior art is not stated, and the patent moves forward, because the examiner believes that it is novel, given what he has in front of him.

Back in the old days, (mid 1990's) I worked at a company that made chip building systems. We filed lots of patents. We deserved to file for them, as we spent beaucoup bucks developing techniques to apply to chip inspection and measurement. We always were sent back to revisit the prior art by the patent examiners. My last job? Some of the stupidest business process patents sailed through, although an afternoon searching on Google would have found reams of invalidating prior art.

If you want to fix the patent system, we need to treble the number of examiners. Alas, the congress critters seem intent to not increase the funding to get to a healthy state.

In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.

Expert juries are an interesting concept that pops up in law reviews from time to time. However, to the best of my knowledge, they're not allowed under the common understanding of the right to a jury of your peers.

There is no reason to believe that patents are somehow such a sacred and / or arcane subject that juries should not be allowed. The exact same arguement can and has been made for many parts of tort law and tax law.

These arguments are typically trotted out by the losers after the fact to justify why they lost. Or by people who think that the laws (patent, tort, tax, etc) should be simplified or reformed.

There IS some validity to their claims. But not to limiting it to patent law.

Even with inflation, I'm pretty sure $20 in 1789 is still less than $1,000,000,000+ in 2012. (Agree with you on the hard-coding - unless their intent was to have it effectively approach zero over time.)

Before "they" had the brilliant idea of removing the dollar from the gold standard, there was no inflation. If you've got an axe to grind about returning to the gold standard, that's one of the stereotypical constitutional arguments. Don't kid yourself that its a new argument.

"Allow any patent that is submitted into public domain, to be filed free of charge."

***

Let's be honest, most ideas are not conceived of in some big corporate lab. Most are conceived in the minds of individuals long before. Often the best ideas are conceived when an idea person is unemployed - a time when they're even harder pressed to find the $1K-$5K to file a patent.

Those individuals, usually do not have the resources to get their ideas off the ground very quickly. They might start, but then they find by the time they're working toward their goal. A big corp with lots of $$$ for lots of developers releases something similar. Worse, now they own the patent on it. The individual now can't even continue their own idea.

Given the millions upon millions spent by both Apple and Samsung in this up to this point, and the millions more to be spent on appeals, I suspect a reasonable compromise could be had whereby each side pledges a stipend for the expert pool. There might even be a "loser pays" clause in there somewhere to add a little extra incentive to not be overly litigious.

Duh. But the more relevant issue is: would a "tribunal" not be swayed by brand loyalty? Is there any reason to believe that would be the case?

"Reason 2: Juries are too easily swayed by âoeheâ(TM)s a copycatâ"

Quote Posner: "patent plaintiffs tend to request trial by jury because they believe that jurors tend to favor patentees, believing that they must be worthy inventors defending the fruits of their invention against copycats."

Posner may have reason to believe that, but it's still nothing more than his opinion about what someone else is thinking. It isn't actual evide

The problems with trial by jury in civil cases go far beyond the specifics of patent law. Patent cases aren't the only ones that rely upon complicated technical and/or legal issues. With criminal trials, we accept that even if juries might not always be as competent as judges, we want them as a safeguard so that the government can't throw people in jail without a representative part of the community saying so. But in civil trials, it's not about the state versus the individual; the issue is whether private party A has to pay money to private party B. Why not have these cases handled by judges, preferably trained in the specific fields at issue? Let's also consider the plight of the jurors: not everyone can easily miss work for long periods of time, and many companies don't pay for jury duty. Again, civic duty might be a plausible justification for doing this for criminal trials, but is it really right to pull private citizens out of their normal lives for months on end to hear a random business dispute between 2 companies?

It's worth pointing out that the jury's role has already been significantly weakened in civil cases. It is not uncommon for judges to order the jury to return a verdict for one particular side in a civil case. (In criminal trials, the judge can order a directed verdict for the defense, but not for the prosecution.) It's also not uncommon for a jury's decision to simply be overridden on the spot by the judge. And even if it survives that, almost all big judgments are modified on appeal. The jury isn't sovereign in deciding civil cases, so what purpose does it serve other than as another stumbling block where things can go wrong?

The US is about the only First World country that has trial by jury in civil cases. There's a reason for this. No one would come up with a system like this today; why should we stick with it just because the Founding Fathers thought it was a good idea 220 years ago?

I have a more revolutionary idea that just sparkled blindingly bright in my mind:

What if I say that any case that a person from the street cannot comprehend should not be a matter of litigation at all?

If the intricacies of alleged Samsung's patent infringement on Apple-owned patents are so complicated that a street person like me need hundreds of volumes of documents to look through, may be there should not be such case at all?

To me, it's the job of the lawyers to educate and present in layman's terms what the case at hand is all about. If we can have jury trials for murder, where expert witnesses present complex evidence, I don't see why we can't have them for patent cases.

"they should be put before an expert tribunal rather than a jury that is easily swayed by schoolyard 'copycat' narratives."

Clearly, the solution is to have juries working at the patent office, scrutinizing each patent for 2-3 days, and patent examiners in the courtroom to accept/reject patent cases using the half-day or less they use now when granting patents in the first place.

The central problem with the current system is that it forces the people actually making things to defend themselves from entrenched interests. We need to redirect that fight so patent holders settle it amongst themselves rather than the wider public.

Set a patent tax at the point of final sale, and have patent holders lodge their claims against products as they come to market. Patent holders themselves will then have the burden of fighting off frivolous patents without troubling the organization actually pr

Screw "expert tribunal", fight to the death! Each side puts up 12 contenders (to tie it to the jury system), twelve "angry" men (or women, whichever). Then, fight it out Kirk & Spock style, ala koon-ut-kal-if-fee in 'Amok Time'. Damages are based on the number of surviving "jurors".

Because otherwise, the "experts" will just get bought off like every other "regulatory" body in the US and it won't be any fun for anyone. I'd be OK if at least one of the jurors was a VP or higher.

Jurors are not supposed to know the people involved in the trial, it creates huge bias.What I want to know is how did they find so many people who did not know Apple or Samsung?Because, of course, if a juror had a iPad and liked it (or just saw an apple ad, or read an article by someone saying that the iPad inspired these other devices) he/she would be biased towards Apple. So of course the only fair trial you could have would be one where all the jurors had never even heard of Apple or Samsung.

are supposed to be in charge of this country. We do not elect the judicial branch of our government, so we need juries to help keep our fingers in the system. If any aspect of the legal system is "too complicated for lay people to understand", the solution is to simplify the system, NOT to remove the people from the equation.

Patents are as complex as other industrial policies like subsidies or regulatory regimes. When disputes arise, they should be put before an expert tribunal rather than a jury that is easily swayed by schoolyard "copycat" narratives.

The same case could be made that voters have no place in democracy. And is: Those seeking to concentrate political and economic strength in the hands of the few and powerful pose governance as a choice between decision making by wise and altruistic "experts" or by the ignorant and selfish common people. The myth of benevolent despotism is as old as the hills.

But that rhetoric was busted long ago. "Industrial Policy" is a euphemism for corporate welfare. "Expert tribunals" are typically comprised of those expert in only cronyism and graft if not incompetent ideologues. So the plan is that a small group of politically appointed experts will assign penalties and grant awards of billions of dollars. What could possibly go wrong?

For those who are not aware, the plan to enact all-powerful government controlled by the benevolent and wise has never really worked out . The actual course has been to grant government powers and then debate our preference for rule by the corrupt few or the incompetent many. (See TFA and surrounding comments.) Perhaps instead we should all consider before granting more power to government that it will not be wielded by wise and benevolent philosopher kings. Those with the knowledge that government power by any system is often misapplied and abused are less willing to grant power to government.

Fundamentally, the choice between administering patent law with "expert tribunals" or trial by jury is a false dichotomy, for we could remedy the problem as well by abolishing patents.

How about leave the system as it is, and 5% of all patent costs go to a fund who's sole purpose is to reveal prior art and offending patents. The targeted patents are based on some algorithm that will return the most to society. This fund should also be open to donations from geeks to big companies who has a say where their own money is spent. If Apple wants to fight a Google prior art I am good for that even if Apple is the devil's devil.

There will be a connection between the number of patents and the funds income. There still is intensive in applying for patents.

The advantage in the UK of course is a specialized Patent Court with Judges and no juries. These Judges are patent specialists spending their time only looking at Patent cases. They are a very sharp bunch. I recall one incident in which the Judge suspended a complex case so he could go and learn some pretty high level biochemistry from the head of biochemistry at Cambridge.

The South Korean courts actually found that there was mutual infringement taking place and issued injunctions against a large number of devices from both Apple and Samsung. They did not rule in Samsung's favor, as you claim, regarding the question of whether or not they infringed. Rather, they mutually ruled against both Samsung and Apple.

The court in the Netherlands, as far as I can tell, did not make any sort of ruling regarding a lack of infringement on Samsun

The problem is, that the jury admitted to skipping entire parts of the case and just awarding apple money. Not just that, but some features that apple has patented were not even apple innovations.
So whether Samsung did copy or not, Apple was awarded money for things it copied.
It isn't the fact that people are pro Samsung or pro Apple, it is that Apple was awarded a giant sum of money due to a broken system and an uneducated jury when it comes to patents.

Samsung copied the same capabilities that Apple copied and put into their products.There's a difference.

Apple copied the rectangle with rounded corners from 3000+ year old clay styluses.Apple copied the finger swipe, pinch resize and other touch screen capabilities from other manufacturers.

Sure they put them together in a way many hadn't seen, but that doesn't make them original, that just makes them smart.Problem is, there are a lot of smart people in the world that can put them together as well.

Despite the clamour from the android community, pretty much everyone I've spoken to who aren't emotionally invested in the result are "pro" the jury and think it was a fair result.

That's just not true. I've heard from many neutral parties and even Apple fans who believe that Apple went too far with these lawsuits and patents. Apple is a great company with great products that should be able to compete in the marketplace without resorting to legal trickery. No one should be able to own the idea of a recta

I would respectfully disagree and say that no, the jury didn't "see it." They blindly rubber-stamped the samsung line in efforts to expedite the amount of time they'd have to dedicate to the trial.

Have you seen a Samsung Epic 4g? Look at it..the only thing that you might be able to say is similar is the grid of icons, and there is significant amount of prior art of a grid of icons, to start with, palm. There is no way anyone could truthfully claim that phone flagrantly copies the iphone, even some 90 yea

And therein lies the problem. The point of a trial is to decide what is LEGAL. It's great when Right and Wrong correspond to Legal and Illegal, but it doesn't always work out that way. One reason it doesn't is because right vs. wrong can be very subjective, but legal vs. illegal is supposed to be very objective.

I'm concerned that this jury simply got offended that "Samsung copied Apple", and didn't fully consider the prior art that would make such copying perfectly legal. The foreman saying they wanted to "send a message", in clear violation of the judge's instructions, calls the result into question.

I like apple products. I have an iPad and iPod touch. Nothing about these products is particularly innovative. There were brick smartphones before iPhone. There were app stores before iPhone. Multitouch existed in the 70's. Icon in grid layout is ANCIENT. What, exactly, is innovative and non-obvious about it? Nothing. It is the natural extension of what was _already_ coming on to the phone market. Heck, their notification center is pretty much a copy of android. Why did they copy it? because it m

Of the top of my head I see four obvious suspects for such a capitalization loss:

1. Investors/speculators agreeing with the Jury.2. Investors/speculators thinking that other investors/speculators will agree with the Jury.3. Investors/speculators thinking that the legal system overall will side with the Jury (appeals and future similar cases).4. Investors/speculators thinking that it will cost Samsung lots of money (directly or just opportunity costs in having to change things) and hence make them significan

In so far as Samsung referenced the iPhone as a de facto standard of what users want and expect from a touchscreen smart phone, yes. Samsung did indeed set out to copy parts of the iPhone.

However, to claim that such behavior is "crap" and that the jury's decision was correct _requires_ you assume that the patents were entirely valid. If there was prior art, then Samsung no more copied Apple than Apple copied the prior art (and neither innovated). If the design was trivial and uninteresting, then Apple di

A jury system is a "check" on the power of the government to enforce unjust laws. Basically weakens the ability of the government to just toss people into jail without opposition. (Unless they call it "indefinite detainment" under the NDAA.)

The flip side of that is that you have ignorant people that are easily swayed by propaganda into wanting to "send a message". This can be compounded by someone on the jury having an obvious conflict of interest.

How could one person force 11 other people to vote his way? And what "send a message" are you talking about? A message about what?

Or in the Apple-Samsung case, simply by claiming to be an expert on patents, prior art AND jury duty because he filed a patent himself and was on juries three times already.Also, there were NINE jurors, not twelve.

As for sending the message... Well, besides the "Velvin Hogan is Batman" (4th jury duty? What is he, a professional juror?) there's that literal quote of his...

"We wanted to make sure the message we sent was not just a slap on the wrist," Hogan said. "We wanted to make sure it was sufficiently high to be painful, but not unreasonable."

A jury system is a "check" on the power of the government to enforce unjust laws. Basically weakens the ability of the government to just toss people into jail without opposition. (Unless they call it "indefinite detainment" under the NDAA.)

In a criminal trial, yes. In a civil trial, not so much. To my knowledge, tautologically speaking, no one has ever been jailed as a result of a civil trial other than for misconduct during the trial process (contempt of court, etc.)....

Yeah no shit, not to mention jury selection can often "weed out" those with brains. There is a good reason why the old joke is "a jury is 12 people too stupid to get out of jury duty" because you can get some doozys in a jury trial. I won't post the entire story but my mom hung a jury for 2 weeks before the judge finally let them go because the rest of the jury thought all Italians were in the mob like "Goodfellas".

So I can see the point of this argument, hell many of us have been total nerds for decades

My hands are wet with light blue paint. The person next to me has purple paint on his hands. You are not colour blind. The evidence has dark blue paint on it. The prosecution and/or defense is not telling you the full an unaltered truth. The judge has disallowed other evidence. Which one of us is guilty? Did I try to wash off the dark blue paint from my hands and made it light blue? Did the other guy try to hide the blue paint on his hands by mixing it with red? Are we both innocent and the wrong people are being tried? Has the evidence that was allowed been altered in some way?

They need to understand something about patent law and something about the subject matter. The Jury foreman actually said this in an interview:

"...wether or not the prior really did invalidate that patent, and so with that moment that I had, I relealized that the software on the Apple side could not be placed into the processor on the prior art and vise versa and that means that they're not interchagable, and that just that just changed everything right there"

Would you trust this guy to be on a jury for a case you were involved with? Obviously he was in over his head and just pulling stuff out of his nether regions. The rest of the jury followed him. And this is a guy who holds a patent and should, ostensibly, have some simple understanding of prior art.

Any adult, given enough facts as presented by both sides, should be able to come to a conclusion as to guilty or innocent.

When the facts are written in legalese, like patent documents, it is easy for the average person to become confused and ignore that evidence. This case was even worse in that the foreman was a self described "expert" and the rest of the jury deferred to his judgement. In effect, this was not a decision of 12 members of a jury but a decision of one expert convincing 11 non-experts.

If it required an in-depth knowledge of the law, we would only have lawyers for jurors, and I think we can all agree that's not a great idea

That is precisely what one gets in a trial by judge. Lawyers who do not have a stake in the outcome of a case can be very impartial and in complex cases like patent law knowledge is the key. It takes years to learn patent law. Do you really think that anyone can absorb all that information in a few weeks of trial? How much of the nuances are lost due to information overload?

The more in-depth knowledge one has on a topic, the less likely you are to get a consensus and the less likely you are to be able to look at a case objectively.

That is precisely the issue in this situation. The jury foreman was well versed in patent law as viewed by a patent holder. When technical questions arose the jury took the foreman's advice instead of deciding on their own or asking the judge question. Legal definitions and complex laws such as patent law are difficult at best. 700 questions is a huge number in a legal case. It take a lot of brain power to keep them straight. Most of the people in this group are well above average intelligence and we have issues dealing with these subjects. Do you really think that someone with an IQ of 90 would have fewer issues?

It is the responsibility of the prosecution and defense to make sure they can come to an informed opinion given the necessary information as presented by both sides.

The primary argument being that this an intractable problem. You are banking on the ability of lawyers to teach a jury portions of law they will understand enough to rule the way each side is advocating. That fundamentally mistreats jurors and the law, it limits the ability of jurors to recognize information outside the scope presented by a lawyer (who might be bad, or simply underestimates the jury), and it supposes that laws can be considered in piecemeal isolation.

Any adult, given enough facts as presented by both sides, should be able to

That is a truly profound assumption, which is the basis of much of jury based legal systems. It's quite possible this assumption is wrong. Whether it's demonstrably right or wrong is harder to say, because legal systems that don't have juries are different from ones that do on more than just the existence of juries.

we would only have lawyers for jurors, and I think we can all agree that's not a great idea;)

um....That's actually a good idea. In effect it is what your supreme court is, which is a 9 rather than 12 person jury of professional legal experts. Just about every country has the most important cases decided by a collection of lawyers or lawmakers for precisely the reason that it is simply not appropriate to have common people establishing definitive precedents.

The more in-depth knowledge one has on a topic, the less likely you are to get a consensus and the less likely you are to be able to look at a case objectively

A lack of consensus may be preferable to decisions based on purely superficial understandings of problems. Broadly speaking the thrust of the article is that Juries aren't capable of making good decisions about patent law, in part because of jurors themselves and in part because the legal system is constrained by having to work around these 'common people' where you are burdening them and their employers to resolve a dispute that justifies far more time and far more expertise than is available to a jury, and may broadly require addressing much deeper questions. Should rectangles be patentable at all is a question that should be addressed before a jury is ever told 'assume they are patentable and work based on that assumption', because that's an absurdly stupid process.

The three basic points he makes:1. Juries start biased, and are being asked to overcome that bias. Which is certainly true of both professional and non professionals.

2. It's harder to prove a negative than a positive, even if the negative is better. 'He copied me, that's why I have a patent on this and he doesn't' is easier to understand than 'we knew that too, but we didn't patent it because it shouldn't be patentable at all' is an inherently worse argument to make. I'm not sure I agree with this, but it's a psychological argument about how juries perceive information and there are valid underlying psychological principles about how people perceive information that have to be considered.

3. Patent problems specifically should be handled by the people who actually issue patents. Whatever you think about juries, you should be able to have a discussion with the people who granted the patent at all about whether or not that should have happened, and the patent system itself may need to pass information up the chain to their government managers about things that are causing them problems. The thing is, patents sort of exist in their own sub legal domain already, I guess the argument about apple vs samsung is that it was outside that sub domain, but that's more of a specific problem than a problem in general with the patents appeal process.

The more science you put in the courtroom the more juries are going to b

One problem that I do see is that the jury foreman is a patent holder himself. That could of been an impact. There's a good chance he didn't like the idea that a jury could come back and say that some patents being given out right now are unfair and/or worthless.

BOTH sides had patents they were trying to enforce. He could easily have sided with Samsung with respect to their patents, but he didn't.

The fact that he held patents at all means he should have been dismissed. There's a reason why, for example, in Oracle v Google, potential jurors that are in the technology sector or had used Java were excused. That reason: because only evidence brought into trial is supposed to be used to determine the outcome. By having patents in his head, he has information that he can't avoid tapping into during deliberation. Lawyers typically screen for that kind of thing and it's surprising they didn't. Perhaps because modern-day patents are all about corporate ownership, and the idea that an individual could hold one is outside their understanding.

That he wasn't dismissed turned out to be a gamble for Apple and a blunder for Samsung. Further reading here [groklaw.net]. Choice quote:

The foreman told a court representative that the jurors had reached a decision without needing the instructions.

>But that's not what the trial was about. At all. I realize you slashtards are groupthinking yourselves into believing some gross miscarriage of justice must have happened because you don't like the outcome,

Four courts in four three countries had trials on the SAME patents. 3 out of 4 courts found in favour of the defendant. One of them found so STRONGLY in favour of the defendant that it ordered the claimant to publicly post advertisements declaring the innocence of the defendant. That's a highly unusua

Isn't that the ideal result? Any blatantly obvious situation is settled outta court. Probably you could replace 90% of jury trials with a coin flip and the remaining 10% could actually go to a jury just to keep things honest.

Then why does anyone pick 12 random people who are screened to ensure they have no legal knowledge and no knowledge of your specific issue

Anti-corruption. Its "cheap and easy" to purchase the vote of a couple people working in your field. Really expensive to purchase every moron out there (at least in advance). If the special jury pool was selected solely of patent lawyers then every decision would be decided based o

sigh... anon, the framers of the US constitution disagree with you. If a dozen or so randomly chosen citizens can't come to an agreement on what a law means, then the law is too complex. Otherwise laws can be written such that anyone can be thrown in the slammer or fined for arcane phrases interpreted by "experts" in ivory towers.
Juries are used as a hedge against many other tricks used by powerful governments against it's citizens as well.